Yeah, it seems the theoretical gain becomes lower the better gear we get. At least for your overall DPS % wise. I think it's safe to say that we should hit cap when we get close to BiS. If we take a proper APL into consideration it becomes even more obvious.

I'll try run some simulations for lower gear levels later to see how much of again it is and if we should keep recommending it for people who believe they can handle it.

On Windlord if you are CCing you are hitting at most 6 targets. This is not enough targets to make Seed spamming effective. At that point it is the highest dps to pick 3 targets and focus on them.

Took a quick look at my inbuffed damage. Agony is the only spell that has higher dpct than SoC in this situation, so I think best would be SB:SoC for Corruption, SoC spam, spending shard procs on SS:SB, manual Agony for targets for which you don't have shards. Do you have math that shows otherwise?

On Windlord if you are CCing you are hitting at most 6 targets. This is not enough targets to make Seed spamming effective. At that point it is the highest dps to pick 3 targets and focus on them. If you have 1 of each pack available use those and you will do the most effective dps.

It was just an example of a fight where SoC spam is the highest in this tier. I've never been doing it because it doesn't make the fight easier to pad your DPS on targets that are not being focused (man it was a bitch explaining this to my guld when they thought Affli lock was worse than other classes just because I was lower on the ovreall DPS). I just know other Warlocks have had a high % of their damage coming from SoC.

If it's a bad example we will need a better one to show at which point haste will pull ahead of mastery with the argument being SoC spam.

To be completely honest I added this because it's been recommended by other people. I've never even bothered checking this myself because I never felt the need to figure it out. Our guild never struggled with enrage timers on a fight where it could've been an option to get more haste for SoC.

Extra ticks of Agony mean nothing as if you let Agony fall off you made a mistake.

There will be times where Agony will drop so it's completely situatonal. Just take Wind Lord as an example. If you keep Agony up on all targets and then a set of adds die you will devote all your DPS to the boss because of the damage taken increase debuff he gets.

We're not going for 6637 haste purely for Agony, though. The next UA tick is at this level. Another dot we might put up but let drop in multiple target situations.

I tend to gem this way but I don't always go for socket bonuses. For example a blue socket is not worth going for the bonus if the bonus is something like 60crit. I don't remember what item it is but I had it at one point.

The gemming part is meant to be purely a guideline. If people know they can get more from ignoring a socket bonus they probably don't need the advice given in the first place. I can reword this though if it's unclear in the first post.

I recently abandoned the 4717 haste threshold and did some reforging and simcrafting to find the best haste-mastery ratio for me to play with. SimCraft tells me i get the most dps at 7726 haste and 4679 mastery rating:
My armory: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...ypsez/advanced

I cannot explain those particular numbers but perhaps they help you get to the bottom of this nasty affliction spec Xelnath forced on us

I recently abandoned the 4717 haste threshold and did some reforging and simcrafting to find the best haste-mastery ratio for me to play with. SimCraft tells me i get the most dps at 7726 haste and 4679 mastery rating:
My armory: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...ypsez/advanced

I cannot explain those particular numbers but perhaps they help you get to the bottom of this nasty affliction spec Xelnath forced on us

That seems extreme and impractical for any non-multi dotting fights, though you have pretty good gear so I don't know, I just feel like there's something wrong with the current SimC but I can't provide any reason for it to be and not be fixed already so I guess just gotta roll with it. :L

Well, this is why it would be nice to have a SimC Warlock developer on the forums. Or at least someone dedicated with the knowledge who can figure out these results.

What SirFlipper brings up on previous page is interesting. Trying to figure out how SimCraft handles haste plateaus is something we should've done long ago. The answers to this just never seem to show up here.

There was a lot of confusion with people bringing up top warlocks not being at the hit cap at the beginning of the tier but with Exp and Exp gems not showing up on the armory and Orc's having the wand off Elegon, it looked like they weren't capped but in actuality they were. The hit cap is still very, very important.

There is alot of confusion when people bring up hit capped warlocks from WoL at the moment, because there is no perfect method of telling what their dps would have been with different reforgings.

Originally Posted by Palmz

I've brought it up before in past discussions so in a nut shell I will say this. Missing one Haunt, especially in a period where you are running highly modified DoTs, under Hero/Lust is a terrible damaging loss. It's damage lost from preemptively setting up a good line to spam MG's and take full advantage of the time these DoTs are up, especially in a period where you are required to do burst damage.

I made two simc logs that have a Haunt hit/miss during a BL. I look at the Haunts fired at ~0:30 so there is only BL and no DS and many procs have run out. Also there is only one shard remaining so both locks can only cast MG during the next 8 seconds. It would be different to have the non-capper use another Haunt because then he has shorter MG time during BL and one less Haunt outside BL so to speak.

Both should have the same amount of ticks from dots and MG. Procs are not the same however. All dots we see after ~0:30s are reciving buffs that were up at ~0:17. Non-cap lock is missing Relic of Yulon, but then he has Jade Spirit later that affects some of the MG ticks. Also the hit-capped lock got the crits.

With this haunt miss the non-cap lock did 511932 less damage during theese 8 seconds, compared to someone with less mastery and 15 % hit. Fight duration for example is 450s so this is making a difference of 1137 dps. If the 2131 mastery is giving dps at 2.5 per point, then he has a 4190 dps advantage remaining from which he can keep loosing in the other miss events. Miss event of one average MG gcd comes from MG second which is ~80 441 damage in the other profile.

Originally Posted by Palmz

Also missing that haunt will bring up a cascading problem. Forcing you to lose 4-5 seconds of mega dot damage, possibly lose the extra damage from a Haunt that might of landed a critical strike, decrease your chances of Nightfall procs and miss your chance to roll Haunts.

How big is the damage difference with your 4-5s and those other things included? Or how did you end up with them?

One thing to note about a Haunt miss is that it can not always get worse for slow players. Everyone is expected to cast something else after the Haunt cast time is over. They will often be in the middle of a MG channel when their world crumbles, but they often have nothing other to do than finishing the MG. If they have shards, and they know that it is still a good time to Haunt, only then they would also need some reflexes.

About shards, if you have a constant amount of shard procs set for the fight, and then you miss one Haunt, it does not reduce your MG uptime for whole fight, because you can not take a gcd of it to use another Haunt since there are not enough shards. If MG uptime stays the same so far, your shard number can not get lower, and you actually have the amount of shards set.

During the BL thing if you start with two shards and miss the first Haunt then in that case the shard generation rng events will be delayed for one gcd, but you are somehow making your damage differences of early shards vs. delayed (by gcd or reaction) ones big here. In a case of 4 wanted Haunts (3 landing), say you miss the second one, making it delaeyd depending on reaction time. But if this means your 3rd Haunt will not get a shard early when you actually wanted it, then during your second Haunt debuff you are without the next shard for too long and you are not even playing the same way as you do when first Haunt is up. You can expect different kind of damage there, so count that in, because simc default action list does, when it is able have more than one shard with BL at the start or under 20 %, and it does not appreaciate hit rating.

Any other miss event but not the Haunt one would directly lower the MG uptime. Therefore when hit-cap versus non-cap is simmed there are less shards for the latter, and it is easily seen, unless he reforges it for haste, but dps is what it is.

Originally Posted by Palmz

Another example would be re-casting a DoT with 1 second left on your trinket buff. With out the hit cap, for instance at the pull, typically your Jade Spirit, DMC trinket proc and Lightweave will end at the same time and be the first of your 6-7 buffs to fall off. With the hit cap you can do a SB:SS with 1 second left with these procs and continue to roll for high amounts of damage while quickly procing Nightfall for more Haunts.

And people would fail at this at 3-8 % rate. What if the non-hit cap lock who does not like it, clips each of the dots separately, begining with those closest to a legit refresh point? Without clipping it looks about like (0:00 DS), 0:08 UA, 0:10 Corr, 0:13 CoA. There are alot of procs there at 0:13 and some seconds after it. One more Haunt can be used immeadetly when wanted and it does not depend on rng. This is default action list ofcourse where missing those spells is not statistically significant enough to make hit cap amazing.

For all of your post you are refering to the dps gain of being below 15 % hit rating as a number of "200-300 dps". But is this not a number from default action list in simc and probably only for some ridiculous 12 % beginner? If you have so many bright ideas about how to play then why don't you first seek for the unique value of hit rating for theese styles, instead of asuming it must be critical? Or it is the other secondary stats I mean that might become stronger too but also faster.

On Windlord if you are CCing you are hitting at most 6 targets. This is not enough targets to make Seed spamming effective. At that point it is the highest dps to pick 3 targets and focus on them. If you have 1 of each pack available use those and you will do the most effective dps.

When I initially did a quick and dirty check on the Hitcap vs no-Hitcap thingie, I actually changed Haste to Mastery and not Hit and then incorrectly claimed that dropping Hit was actually a DPS loss. I corrected myself a couple of posts later, dropping 3% Hit is in fact about a 300 DPS gain, see this and this post (which also link to the relevant reports, so you can check the simulation settings yourself.

Now, I think that the current APL favors not hitcapping for two reasons:
- it refreshes DoTs as early as possible no matter the power of the DoTs and the current spellpower
- it uses Haunt everytime it can, which makes it less likely to miss a Haunt within a DS window
Saving Shards for DS can be added to the APL without changing too much, but dynamically refreshing early or late depending on the spellpower/haste of the DoTs is more complicated. Especially because you might want to refresh a weak DoT late if you are about to pop DS and will then refresh anyway.

With this in mind, I think that the logic behind hitcapping still holds merrit. You eliminate one random factor that might just take you that few seconds to long to react to or that might take your focus away from some crucial encounter mechanic. Hitcapped you can basically plan your rotation 5 or 10 seconds ahead, without hitcap you might need to decide on the spot what to do.

As for Windlord, I am pretty sure that spamming SoC while using your Shards for SB:SS is the way to go if you have 7 targets (SB:SS should have a higher DPET than any other spell if you apply all 3 DoTs, didn't check that though). Feel free to provide any numbers to the contrary. As I mentioned before, even at Wind Lord SoC is only 5% of your overall damage. This is obviously due to the 600% additional damage the Boss takes after a group dies, but even if you ignore this mechanic, you will always have DoTs ticking on as many targets as you have Shards for, so I would not be sure that Haste is at some point the best stat for such a fight.

Originally Posted by Bonkura

Well, this is why it would be nice to have a SimC Warlock developer on the forums. Or at least someone dedicated with the knowledge who can figure out these results.

What SirFlipper brings up on previous page is interesting. Trying to figure out how SimCraft handles haste plateaus is something we should've done long ago. The answers to this just never seem to show up here.

I am still waiting for you to incorporate them into the original post or at least reply to them. SimCraft does not "handle" Haste plateaus, it just simulates your character (by executing a simple action priority list). The haste plateaus do not have to be "treated", they just happen.

Originally Posted by luckydevours

I recently abandoned the 4717 haste threshold and did some reforging and simcrafting to find the best haste-mastery ratio for me to play with. SimCraft tells me i get the most dps at 7726 haste and 4679 mastery rating:
...
My armory: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...ypsez/advanced

I cannot explain those particular numbers but perhaps they help you get to the bottom of this nasty affliction spec Xelnath forced on us

I would assume that this is a local maximum and not a global maximum. If I go for this Haste rating I lose DPS, but I can't really explain what is going on there... will need to take a closer look tomorrow.

Now, I think that the current APL favors not hitcapping for two reasons:
- it refreshes DoTs as early as possible no matter the power of the DoTs and the current spellpower
- it uses Haunt everytime it can, which makes it less likely to miss a Haunt within a DS window
Saving Shards for DS can be added to the APL without changing too much, but dynamically refreshing early or late depending on the spellpower/haste of the DoTs is more complicated. Especially because you might want to refresh a weak DoT late if you are about to pop DS and will then refresh anyway.

Then default list must be good at simulating non-hit cap dps if real players also do not let their dots drop.

I wrote above what a MG second is. Missing a dot at any duration remaining means losing damage based on this, in every list that has MG as a filler. Compared to it, in that above profile, DoT second for UA is ~13 872 damage. If the UA is dropped it can be down for any amount of time, also smaller than 1 s, and not always for a gcd. In lists where dots are alowed to drop there would be zero to few damages like this missing for the non-cap (not in the logs, logs have ticks, UA second is from average dot dps).

Default list has many shards only in the first DS, and it uses them the way it does. After that it can have 1 or 0 shards when the next DS is ready. So how this could go is that you say it misses the same amount of Haunts as a list that has more shards ready before DS. When default suffers a Haunt miss event it is with higher probability an event with somewhat less damage loss, while the other profile has a good chance to have those Haunts missing that are in DS. This is not proper for deciding what stat is good necessarily. Consider if the other list has 4 shards when DS begins. As he misses, this has the damage penalty I did not want to consider above, because it is actually followed by another Haunt. It is very likely that those 4 shards, and new shards generated, will last through the DS. My example had shards for quite long.

Then when you compare damages in new list there are results like "All DS covered with Haunts (hit-cap)" and "All DS covered with Haunts while getting misses as is expected (non-cap)"

In default list instead you are comparing damages that had "as many Haunts during DS as possible (hit-cap)" vs. "8 s full Haunt missing from a DS (non.cap)".

I still say that it can be easy to say that some event or style is making hit rating more or less valuable. But for gear decisions you would have to know the value of other stats also.

Originally Posted by Sirflipper

With this in mind, I think that the logic behind hitcapping still holds merrit. You eliminate one random factor that might just take you that few seconds to long to react to or that might take your focus away from some crucial encounter mechanic. Hitcapped you can basically plan your rotation 5 or 10 seconds ahead, without hitcap you might need to decide on the spot what to do.

If you do not trust random factors then you should not expect to be dealing much consistent damage with the proc boosting. Also when you do it you are first supposed to react to see a new buff coming up, which is as hard as seeing a miss warning. Then, if there were no smart robot addons, you would start making decisions reflecting on the durations of three different dots. If you decide to wait for the proc to go short before you refresh, you will have to focus on the buff timer for 5-10 seconds. If you only focus on the addon then since all procs are random and some can come up immeadetly after expiring, you will probably focus on that addon for 100 % of the time. Is any of this better for dealing with the bosses, compared to the quick decision making you deal with in non-cap?

Another thing is someone better make the action lists that follow procs, more humanly possible than what the default is now, or I guess people's hype for those dps gains won't be justified.

I've even had a Warlock in my guild following this and stacking mastery to well above 8000. Then he complained about me doing more damage because I had slightly more mastery when I was also sitting at almost 2000 more haste than him. This at Sha of Fear HC progress... sigh.

Hej Bonk, fan vilken kuk du är.

Anywho, I am this warlock he speaks of, and while we were at it Bonk here had not even just better gear then me overall, but also had 4 set bonus - which I did not.
Sure he did more damage than me, at the pull, he had some sick burst (me 260k he 300k) but at the end of the fights we were about the same, and also, in ph2 - with alot of adds - I did MORE damage then him.

Anyway, I'm not even qualified (or frankly, I can't be arsed) to go into this discussion about what is best etcetc, I just had to come and defend myself :>

I'm not claiming that "my way" is THE way to go, or that Bonk's is but what I do works great for me, I have several top 10 ranks so unless someone proves to me that this way (or any other for that matter) it THE way, I'm sticking with mine. :>

I am still waiting for you to incorporate them into the original post or at least reply to them. SimCraft does not "handle" Haste plateaus, it just simulates your character (by executing a simple action priority list). The haste plateaus do not have to be "treated", they just happen.

I haven't had time to go through everything in the thread more than reading what's been posted. I'll get to it in a day or two. Sorry about that.

I also have to admit that it's probably good if I don't respond to everything and let other people share their thoughts on what's being discussed here with unbiased opinions. Especially since I'm no genius when it comes to theorycrafting and just doing this to encourage a discussion about the topics brought up here. ^^

Originally Posted by Kozya

Anyway, I'm not even qualified (or frankly, I can't be arsed) to go into this discussion about what is best etcetc, I just had to come and defend myself :>

I didn't mention your name so why does it matter?

Originally Posted by Kozya

I'm not claiming that "my way" is THE way to go, or that Bonk's is but what I do works great for me, I have several top 10 ranks so unless someone proves to me that this way (or any other for that matter) it THE way, I'm sticking with mine. :>

You're just proving that you are a really good player who doesn't spend much time with theorycrafting and just go for the general suggestions for gearing. In theory you're not losing more than ~1% DPS so it's not really that big of a deal and you're probably aware of it.